VMware’s acquisition of Nicira posted a big risk on Cisco’s future control of networking market. The risk was in fact there from day one of VMware ESX with virtual switches and then distributed virtual switches, which reduces the need for customers to buy physical geeks from Cisco because virtual machines use “free” virtual ports. For the inter-physical server communication, customers still need Cisco and other vendors even though the volume is not as high as otherwise. That is why Cisco quickly came up with its own distributed virtual switch Nexus 1000v to stay relevant in the virtualization market. Read more...

On this past Monday VMware announced to buy Nicira for $1.26 billion. Congratulations to many of my former VMware colleagues who joined Nicira and will return back to VMware soon.

Overall this deal aligns well with VMware’s newly found vision on software defined data center. You must have read many of similar explanations and comments from various sources including this one from VMware CTO Steve Herrod, and this one by Nicira cofounder and CTO Martin Casado. Read more...

In my previous article, I talked about three different ways enterprises use Hadoop. Thinking a bit more, you may have come to realize that the three usage patterns are very similar to how we use Tomcat. I will compare these two for commonalities and differences.

First of all, both Hadoop and Tomcat are Java based open source projects from Apache Foundation, thus copyrighted by the same Apache license. As a result, you can freely use Hadoop in the same way as you have used Tomcat in terms of license compliance. Read more...

BusinessWeek recently published an article “In Silicon Valley, Hardware is Hot Again.” Almost all big names started to sell hardware now, Microsoft, Google, and Apple of course. Apple’s stellar success in iPhone and iPad disrupted the conventional wisdom that software is higher in margin compared to hardware. Also, Apple’s hardware and software combined devices posts a real risk for Microsoft and Google. To be exact, the hardware in the article title should really be software bundled hardware. That is why Google and Microsoft had to get into hardware business competing directly against Apple. Read more...

During the Hadoop Summit 2012 last month, I learned the release of the open source (Apache license) Serengeti project from VMware. The week after, I downloaded the OVA file from VMware site, and gave my first try with a development environment after browsing through the user guide which introduces a fairly easy process to get a Hadoop cluster to run on vSphere. Read more...

As a long time Eclipse user, I like its workspace concept and the ease of switching workspaces among many other things. The workspace provides a simple yet powerful way to isolate groups of projects into different workspaces under different folders, so you’re not distracted by other un-related projects.

This feature is, however, not available in Netbeans IDE, which is not a big deal most of time. By default, the Netbeans IDE creates a folder under current user’s home directory as follows (yours could be different): Read more...

Hadoop has recently gained lots of attentions from enterprises. Just think about the rapid growth of attendees in Hadoop Summit. There are many different ways to leverage Hadoop in enterprises. But in general, there are three major types of usage patterns as detailed below.

As a Framework

This is what Hadoop was initially intended to be, and continues to be one of the major approaches in the short term. It means that an enterprise needs to invest in customized application development, which normally costs more than out of shelf applications. Read more...

As I mentioned in a previous article, Hadoop is in a similar stage as virtualization 10 years ago – the technology is mostly ready for wider adoption. There were certain secret sauces leading to virtualization’s stellar success, especially VMware in the enterprise space. Here I examine some of these success factors that could be learned by Hadoop community.

While learning Hadoop, I was wondering whether the MapReduce processing model that can handle all the Big Data challenges. David DeWitt and Michael Stonebrakeer took a step further by arguing MapReduce is a major step backwards in their blog article. I found it’s a very good reading but not necessarily agree with the authors. It’s always good to know different opinions and the contexts where they come from. I also found the authors wrote the best introduction of MapReduce in several short paragraphs. I quote them in the end, so read on. Read more...

As most of us know, Hadoop is a Java implementation of the MapReduce processing model originated from Google by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. After studying Hadoop and attending several related events(Hadoop Summit, Hadoop for Enterprise by Churchill Club), I felt I should dig deeper by reading the original paper.

Code review is important for the quality of a software product. It used to be a meeting activity where a small group of engineers walk through changes and provide the author feedbacks. This is highly effective but not flexible enough, especially when there are frequent code changes. Read more...

While talking about the data processing, we naturally take CPU for granted. However, latest GPU (Graphics Processing Unit, also know as Visual Processing Unit, or VPU) comes with hundreds of cores and calculates much faster than CPU. The question is how practical it is to use GPUs in processing big data. Read more...

Recently I got several questions and even a bug on supporting the next release of vSphere in the open source VI Java API. The questions are mostly from VMware partners who have early access of the private beta of next release of vSphere and want to ship their own products at the same time of vSphere GA. I figure more partners may have the same question, therefore decide to answer it all here with a possible work around. Read more...

I went to LinkedIn last Wednesday for a tech talk by UC Berkeley professor Joseph Hellerstein on Programming for Distributed Consistency: CALM and Bloom. This is indeed a highly specialized topic, so I am not going to talk about the details. Should you be interested in the new programming language Bloom, you can check the web site (http://bloom-lang.org). Read more...

Given the growing popularity of Hadoop, I decided to give it a try by myself. As normal, I searched for a tutorial first and got one by Yahoo, which is based on Hadoop 0.18.0 virtual machine. I knew the current stable version is 1.x, but that is OK because I just wanted to get a big picture and I didn’t want to refuse the convenience of ready-to-use Hadoop virtual machine. Read more...

This past week was a busy one for Hadoop community with two Hadoop events in Silicon Valley. The first one was “what role will hadoop play in the enterprise” by Churchill Club which attracted about 300 attendees in a Palo Alto hotel. The second one was the much bigger conference Hadoop Summit in San Jose Convention Center. I will write a separate article on the second event soon. Read more...

While working in virtualized environments, we need to pass around virtual machines (a.k.a. virtual appliances) from time to time. Most of the virtual machines I’ve seen for downloading are compressed to save storage and network bandwidth.

Not all the compression algorithms are created equal in terms of compression ratio, compressing speed, and decompressing speed. In most cases, it doesn’t really matter that much with documents and small programs. But it matters a lot with virtual machines whose virtual disk files are much larger than normal files. Any small percentage improvement can result in significant saving on storage and bandwidth. Read more...

Many of us have already heard of the term “software stack.” It shows the software layers in boxes stacking up on each other, all the way from operating system, to middleware, and to applications. When these layers are offered as services, we have IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service), PaaS (Platform As A Service), and SaaS (Software As A Service) respectively for so called cloud service stack. These two stacks are essentially similar if not the same. Read more...

Once upon a time, there was a famous vision – “The network is the computer.” If you have been with ITindustry long enough, you would know what the company was behind the vision. Inspired the vision for computer, I am inventing yet another one for cloud – “The data is the cloud.” Read more...

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My company has created products like vSearch ("Super vCenter"), vijavaNG APIs, EAM APIs, ICE tool. We also help clients with virtualization and cloud computing on customized development, training. Should you, or someone you know, need these products and services, please feel free to contact me: steve __AT__ doublecloud.org.

Me: Steve Jin, VMware vExpert who authored the VMware VI and vSphere SDK by Prentice Hall, and created the de factor open source vSphere Java API while working at VMware engineering. Companies like Cisco, EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell, VMware, are among the users of the API and other tools I developed for their products, internal IT orchestration, and test automation.